Four Seasons - Sakura
by Chrysantheme
Summary: When Sakura realises she would give her everything for the men around her, they are in the middle of a training session. Team7!Bonding, fluff piece. Can stand alone, but part of the Four Seasons-verse. After the Forest of Death.


For anyone reading my multi-chaptered fic - I'M SO SORRY I HAVEN'T UPDATED _THE FOUR SEASONS_!

Anyone else, don't worry **this can be read as a stand-alone** , but it does fall in the four season's verse.

This is a view of what Team 7 would be like a few months into Four Seasons, but waay further on than the published chapters. Don't really know where it came from, but I like it and I thought I should share it. **Has a little treat of what's coming with Sakura's father's revelation** of what the heck is up with her, but not much. It's mostly general Team 7 fluff. Again, stands alone.

Warnings for a slightly masochistic Naruto, sadistic Sasuke, slutty Kakashi and crazy Sakura. Blame the 'verse, please.

Enjoy. And don't kill me! I'll update on the main story as soon as I finish Chapter 5. I'm about… 50% through.

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Four Seasons – Sakura

 _Spring._

When Sakura realises she would give her everything for the men around her, they are in the middle of a training session.

Kakashi decided that, no matter how much each of them trains with their respective teachers and masters, the team spirit must be kept strong. Naruto calls outright bullshit, because their sensei _obviously_ just misses being able to poke fun at them, and Sasuke-teme was probably feeling all sorts of wrong with only Kakashi hanging around. He receives a sharp jab on the neck that Sakura just knows he's masochistically enjoying, and Kakashi-sensei's perennial smile makes Sasuke-kun hum in a way that shows his obvious pleasure at the blonde's pain. It's a bit worrying when she realises that she doesn't find the whole thing strange at all.

Still, she settles into her katas as she conducts her chakra through the motions. Beside her, Kakashi swipes the pages of his porn slowly, and she sneaks a glance when she thinks he's not looking. He notices, of course, and tilts the spine just so, until the words slant too much, to be read from the angle she's positioned. Her left shoulder ticks, because she knows it's so on purpose, because Kakashi takes immeasurable pleasure in that clenched, isolated movement between her trapezius and her deltoid. His answering eye-smile tells her as much.

(Briefly, she wonders how they look from the outside: the one-eyed, slouchy jounin leaning on the tree and perusing his orange book and the young genin methodically moving through her katas. They're movements so slight that the full conversation they just had barely registers as slight faults in her movements and lazy enjoyment of literature. Their interactions are always in the details.)

When she glides through her second kata Naruto has successfully pummelled Sasuke into the dirt, though the illusion breaks quite quickly and Sakura watches as Naruto realises what felt solid under his hands was only because his sense of touch was fooled. Sasuke's clone dissipates as it hits the ground and Naruto lets out a stream of curse words and improper expressions. Sakura remembers the days her ears would bleed a little when she heard him speak like that, loose and unrepentant, when he first decided that Team 7 would get all of him or nothing at all, and proceeded to be unabashedly himself for the next four hours before they got him to understand that they weren't quite ready for that sorry, if he could just give it out in small amounts they were sure they'd be able to accept all the types of crazy he had inside at some point. He'd agreed, barely.

(It didn't really go like that, at all. There was a lot of screaming and punching and nails scraping on skin and Sasuke's annoying, petulant little smile as Sakura drove her fist into Naruto's parted lips. Kakashi still hadn't arrived and now she had a barely functioning lump of flesh beside her and an arrogant if loveable shit standing primly to her right and suddenly Naruto was choking/laughing and what the hell? He'd enjoyed it she knows it, they both enjoyed it and she's really very sorry for herself right now, basket case that she/they are maybe Inner should come out an play because she doesn't think she can deal with the situation herself.

So Sakura hears herself calmly tell Naruto that no matter how much crazy he wants to unload on the both of them he has to understand they all have their little bout of crazy to deal with so please shut the fuck up before she forces herself on Sasuke-kun in front of him and then they both really won't like that, will he. Inner ignores both Naruto's low whines and the high pitched noise - _nngh_ \- that comes somewhere around the proximity of Sasuke-kun's mouth, although it's tight and pinched and he holds the best poker face of all Poker Face Kingdom, which surely makes him Prince of said Kingdom, making Kakashi the King when he _really_ tries. Sakura decides that's the time when she has to take back control over her body because the crazy is spreading too much through the three of them.)

"Sakura."

She tilts her head as she watches Naruto and Sasuke-kun approach her, stumbling and knocking into each other with as much grace as they possibly can. The Uchiha remains upright when possible, and shoves off Naruto's weight when the grinning ninja leans in too much, basically prancing through the field in her direction. She nods, moves to her backpack beside the grey-haired ninja and gestures to her teammates to move closer. She starts on Sasuke, because Naruto's wounds are already healing and if the only good thing the Kyuubi can do is to make her job easier, then she'll take it. Sasuke loses all pretence of grace and virtually throws himself onto her, so much that she grunts as she shifts his head a little further onto her right shoulder instead of nose-diving into her neck. She starts on his back, so that she can then lay him down beside her without hurting him anymore.

(Five months ago she would have squealed and hid her face behind her hands while she uselessly flapped about. She would have pressed his face even further into her neck, suffocating him with her clammy, sweaty skin. He would have flailed and pushed off of her, glaring at her and walking away from them, before requesting a transfer. He wouldn't even have deigned her a word. No. He wouldn't have pressed into her at all.)

Even now, almost a month after their experiences in the Forest of Death, it still feels so new to her. Like a set of sandals she has to break in, that still hurt a little at the heel, that scrape against her ankle when she runs too fast or kicks too strong. They still have those new smells; that mix of rubber and plastic and leather that her father taught her to hide by rubbing leaves and earth onto them. Kakashi's silent conversations still take a little bit of time to process, Naruto's genuine eagerness shines too bright and Sasuke's trust… Sasuke's trust takes her breath away, each time.

When Sakura realises she would give her everything for the men in Team 7, they are in the middle of a training session. She isn't cradling a half-dead Sasuke in her arms, she isn't punching the living days out of a prejudiced civilian; she isn't even sitting silently beside a mournful Kakashi in front of a memorial.

She has a hand on Sasuke's temple; chakra seeping through the skin, healing the headache she knows is there simply by the telling rise of his left eyebrow. She has her feet on either side of Naruto's body, from when he wanted to settle into her while waiting for the Kyuubi to heal him and unceremoniously grabbed each leg with one of his hands and parted her knees with a grin, before stumbling into the space in between and settling his head into the space Sasuke's had been, his back a solid weight on her chest. She has her eyes on Kakashi's book, craning her neck to read from behind his shoulder as he makes enough pauses to accommodate her slower reading pace. They both know she's too young for his literature, but he figures she's got a few years to educate herself before they try to force her to go on seduction missions, not that any of the men in Team 7 would let her. At least this way, he told her silently, she won't ever be unaware of men's less than innocent advances; she'd be prepared, and she could be three steps ahead of them.

There, with a hand to Sasuke's forehead, Naruto resting on her and her chin against her sensei's shoulder, Sakura feels the calmest she ever thought she'd be. The three of them silence the growing voice in her head, and it is wonderful and awesome, she feels like a little girl squealing in her father's arms and a woman lulling her children to sleep and a shinobi holding her fort. She has her free hand close to her kunai pouch, close to the ground and her senses are spread in a 50m radius and she's as aware of black, feathery hair between her fingers as she is the rabbit hopping 38m away. She knows her teammates are aware of her chakra ruffling the grass below them but they say nothing because she needs this comfort. They know she won't ever be as peaceful as when she's holding all three of them close to her.

So Naruto loudly exclaims his genuine need for contact and irreverently takes everything she can give, everything she doesn't know she wants to give, whenever he wants to, because her punches and her embraces both feel like velvet on his skin, because they both acknowledge it's as much for her sake as it is for his. Kakashi makes lame excuses for sharing his porn because he gives _touch_ , skin to anyone who asks, has sex with another woman every night and if there is anything _his_ to give, anything this one not-quite-a-woman who means more than all the women he's invited into his bed –anything she can take that will be _hers_ it is his literature and his honest silence. Sasuke just touches her, whenever he knows no one's around, whenever her eyes loose a bit of her glimmer, when he feels she's losing touch with the world around her and sometimes it's a nudge, sometimes it's a bit more, most times it's only a word, a proper sentence in that tone that is all Sakura's and no one else's and it touches her enough to come back down to earth and settle down. It does nothing for him, the touch, not like it does for Naruto, but her eyes glow a little brighter, her step a little stronger and it eases a perpetual knot in his chest. If Naruto's touch warms her, and Kakashi's touch makes her belong, then Sasuke's touch grounds her to the reality that is Team 7.

He is the sole's of her shoes, like Kakashi is the structure, like Naruto is the warm padding on her skin. And then she's crying, and the three say nothing, there's nothing to say really, nothing at all.

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….Ummm. Review?


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